The advent of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) brought with it a killer feature: the ability to directly export your data to BigQuery. Previously, this kind of functionality had only been available with the (expensive!) Analytics 360 plan. Those of us without deep pockets would use the Google Analytics API to…

Introduction Like many data teams, we have spent our fair share of time figuring out how to retrieve data from the many places it’s generated and pool it all in one central location — a data warehouse— so that our data can be easily activated by the business. Activation of data…

This is the final article in a three-part series. Introduction — data in practice Over the last five years at Apolitical, the global platform for government, I and my team had the chance to do something exciting: to build up the company’s data infrastructure and systems from scratch. In this trilogy of articles I’m taking…

This is the second article in a three-part series. Introduction — data infrastructure Over the last five years at Apolitical, the global platform for government, I and my team had the chance to do something exciting: to build up the company’s data infrastructure and systems from scratch. I’m taking the time, in this trilogy…

This is the first article in a three-part series. Why read these articles? Over the last five years at Apolitical, the global platform for government, I and my team had the chance to do something exciting: to build up the company’s data infrastructure and systems from scratch. Always a small team, we had to…

Why this tutorial? From time to time I like to idly answer questions on StackOverflow. There are two sorts of questions I look for: specific questions in a niche area in which I want to continue developing expertise beginner questions in Python or SQL that I can answer quickly (maybe saving someone else…

At Apolitical we recently spent some time trying to codify ‘the way we do things’. Out of those discussions have come various sets of principles and best practices. Introduction One area that sparked a deep and thoughtful discussion was code review — a crucial part of any engineering team’s workflow. We…

Introduction Over the Easter holiday I found myself well-and-truly nerd sniped by a question on Stack Overflow. It happens. Anyway, I am reproducing my answer here (to justify the amount of time I spent on it…). Let me first describe the question at hand. Imagine a case where someone has given…

So, it’s ‘freedom day’, and rather inauspiciously the Health Secretary has (mild) COVID and both the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer are self-isolating. So what’s going on? Unfortunately, the emergence of the Delta variant of COVID has changed the landscape in several important ways. Crucially, it is much…